Collaborative Research: Planning: FIRE-PLAN:High-Spatiotemporal-Resolution Sensing and Digital Twin to Advance Wildland Fire Science

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The number of catastrophic wildfires in the United States has been steadily increasing in recent decades, which generate casualties, large loss of properties, and dramatic environmental changes. However, it is difficult to make accurate predictions of wildland fire spread in real time for firefighters and emergency response teams. Although many fire spread models have been developed, one of the biggest challenges in their operational use is the lack of ground truth fire data at high spatiotemporal resolutions, which are indispensable for model evaluation and improvements. The objective of this planning project is to bring together wildland fire science researchers, fire sensing and data science experts, and diverse stakeholders to develop standards and requirements for high-spatiotemporal-resolution wildland fire sensing and digital twin construction. An organizing committee will be formed from wildland fire science, engineering, and stake holder communities including fire ecology and behavior modeling, pollution monitoring, robotics, cyber physical systems (CPS), wildfire fighting, indigenous cultural burns, and prescribed fires. A series of physical and remote workshops will be held focusing on themes such as open fire data for wildland fire modeling validation, digital twins for prescribed fires, and safe and efficient wildland fire data collection. Research tasks of this planning project include: 1) identification of key high-spatiotemporal-resolution fire metrics and data representations to support fire model validation and fire operations, 2) proposition of sensing strategies and algorithms for fire sensing and suppression robots and cyber physical systems that can support safe and efficient collection of desired high-resolution fire data, 3) development and evaluation of data assimilation and digital twin construction using high-resolution data to advance fire behavior modeling, coupled fire-atmosphere modeling, and smoke modeling, and 4) prototype and initial fire data ecosystem demonstration including collection of cultural burn data and establishment of GeoFireData, a benchmark fire data sharing and digital twin website, which can support different fire operation types such as fire spread model validation and controlled burn planning. The special attention will be devoted to interdisciplinary training of the next generation of scientists working with wildfire risks at the interface of computational sciences, engineering, ecology, and data sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.